Bicameral Headbanger Episode 56

We the People suffer from two spiritual diseases: the first is our staunch narcissisism, the second is our addiction to the image of perfection.

The reasons that you get into arguments or conflicts or fights with other people are the same reasons people have always argued and fought, power, vision, safety, resources, all of that is normal. But when you absolutely cannot believe that someone could possibly disagree with you, the reason you can’t understand them or hope to reason with them, the reason you can’t control the rage you feel when you are confronted by even the simplest of disagreements — that is because you as an American have been trained since your birth to cultivate a personality disorder.

That disorder is narcissism, and we all suffer from it. “A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem; erotic pleasure derived from contemplation or admiration of one’s own body or self, especially as a fixation on or a regression to an infantile stage of development.” Lurching between delusions of grandeur and blinding fits of rage, unable to imagine or visualize the interests of others, preferring our own simple pleasures to the existential needs of others, not only on a personal level but also institutionally or nationally (patriotism, “life-boat ethics”) — that is narcissism.

The ideological environment that allows American narcissism to exist and to thrive is the illusion of perfection. Perfection starts with a centralized, metaphysically powerful hallucination, such as God, or Manifest Destiny, or the Blood of the Volk, or White Supremacy, or infinite Arbitrage Opportunities, or the hero principle (Stalin, Mao, Trump). That central hallucination takes on infinite significance (you can say anything about God because God is everything and he can do anything – the end of thought – you can say nothing correctly because God is indescribable – the end of innovation – and you must revere the mystery of God because he will kill you – the end of rebellion). Change itself is arrested, all movement is frozen. That’s you driving in your car for four hours a day, that’s spending your tiny allotment of lifetime in front of a television screen watching a bunch of nonsense that can never make you happy, that’s your push notifications and your filter bubbles and your patriotism and those funny blind spots at the corners of your eyes where babies are being killed by your tax dollars, where your chocolate bar pays for toxic waste in the water table. Where any change whatsoever to your routine is endlessly annoying.

Where you are alone. Where you are comfortable. Where you are warm. Where nothing changes. The illusion of perfection.

Perfection and Narcissism are the twin obstacles that are planted inside our minds and our bodies and keep us from actually doing anything to stop the crooks and the thieves and the racists that rule our society. America is an inverted totalitarianism, where instead of the state taking over and killing its opponents, the businesses took over and pacified its opponents, taught them to be “happy” and to “be good to yourself” and “live the good life” and hate anything that is not their own skin. They don’t have to kill you if you don’t care enough to fight. They don’t have to hurt you if you’ve already forgotten, if you’ve already given up your power.

We the American people have got to renounce our narcissism, renounce our perfectionism, and to put it very simply, fight back while there is still time.